"Pardon me, I beg of you," she replied to Leopold, "if I continue to reject your advice to leave Paris. Consider that I do not belong to myself. My duty is to remain where Providence has placed me, and to oppose my body, if the necessity should arise, to the knives of the assassins who would fain reach the king. I should be unworthy of the name of our mother, which is as dear to you as to me, if danger could make me desert the king and my children.[6]" We have seen that Marie Antoinette dreaded calumny more than the knife or poison of the assassin; and there could hardly have been a greater proof how well founded her apprehensions were, and how unscrupulous her enemies, than is afforded by the fact that, in the latter part of this year, they actually brought back Madame La Mothe to Paris with the purpose of making a demand for a re-investigation of the whole story of the fraud on the jeweler--a pretense for reviving the libelous stories to the disparagement of the queen, the utter falsehood and absurdity of which had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the whole world four years before. Nor was it wholly a Jacobin plot. La Fayette himself was, to a certain extent, an accomplice in it. As commander of the National Guard of the city, it was his duty to apprehend one who was an escaped convict; but instead of doing so he preferred identifying himself with her, and on one occasion had what Mirabeau rightly called the inconceivable insolence to threaten the queen with a divorce on the ground of unfaithfulness to her husband. She treated his insinuations with the dignity which became herself, and the scorn which they and their utterers deserved; and he found that his conduct had created such general disgust among all people who made the slightest pretense to decency, that he feared to lose his popularity if he did not disconnect himself from the plotters. Accordingly, he separated himself from the lady, though he still forbore to arrest her, and for some time confined himself to his old course of heaping on the royal family these petty annoyances and insults, which he could inflict with impunity because they were unobserved except by his victims. It is remarkable, however, that Mirabeau, who held him in a contempt which, however deserved, had in it some touch of rivalry and envy, believed that the queen was not really so much the object of his animosity as the king. In his eyes "all the manoeuvres of La Fayette were so many attacks on the queen; and his attacks on the queen were so many steps to bring him within reach of the king. It was the king whom he really wanted to strike; and he saw that the individual safety of one of the royal pair was as inseparable from that of the other as the king was from his crown.[7]" And this opinion of Mirabeau is strongly corroborated by the Count de la Marck, who, a few weeks later, had occasion to go to Alsace, and who took great pains to ascertain the general state of public feeling in the districts